Archive for readercon

I’ll be at Readercon this weekend in Quincy, Massachusetts. Hope to see some of you there! Here’s my schedule.

Friday July 08, 2016
3:00 PM, CFantastical Dystopia.Victoria Janssen, Ada Palmer, Andrea Phillips, Sabrina Vourvoulias, T.X. Watson.
Dystopia is popular in YA fiction for a variety of reasons, but why do authors frequently base their future dystopian society on some flimsy ideas, rather than using history to draw parallels between past atrocities and current human rights violations? Is it easier to work from one extreme idea, such as “love is now considered a disease” rather than looking at the complexities of, for example, the corruption of the U.S.S.R or the imperialism of the US? If science fiction uses the future to look at the present, is it more or less effective when using real examples from the past to look at our present through a lens of the future?

Friday July 08, 2016
4:00 PM, BHIntegrating the Id: What Fanfic can Tell Us About Writing Sex, Sexuality, and Intimacy.Samuel Delany, Victoria Janssen, Natalie Luhrs, Kate Nepveu (leader), Kenneth Schneyer, Ann Tonsor Zeddies.
Sex scenes can be difficult to do well, but when they succeed, they can be highly efficient ways to reveal aspects of character. What are some pitfalls of writing sex scenes, and can fanfic teach us how to do it well? Does a sex scene need to be explicit, and does it even need to have “sex” at all, or is the key the intensity and intimacy that we associate with sex?

Friday July 08, 2016
7:00 PM, 5Single Wise Advisor Seeks Same.Victoria Janssen, Shariann Lewitt, Robert V. S. Redick, Lauren Roy.
Epic fantasy abounds with wise advice-givers who help steer heroes in the right direction. These figures are often depicted as elderly, unmarried or widowed, and childless. (Exemplars are Gandalf, Dallben, and Granny Weatherwax. The rare exceptions include Belgarath, Nanny Ogg, and Miracle Max.) Why do we find it so difficult to imagine these grandparental figures having emotional lives of their own? How might the shape of epic stories shift if advisors have more to do with their time than sitting around advising?

Saturday, July 09, 2016
3:00 PM, 6Ladybromances.C.S.E. Cooney, Gwynne Garfinkle, Theodora Goss (leader), Victoria Janssen, Navah Wolfe.
Our friendships are hugely important relationships in our lives, but fiction focuses primarily on romance. Friendships between women receive especially short shrift. We tend to have many more friendships than romantic partners and they can be just as strong and passionate as romances, so why does romance take precedence? What fiction has displayed strong friendships or romances between women? What kinds of stories would we like to see about this kind of relationship?

Friday, July 11, 11:00 AM. GDrift-Compatibile Fictional Characters.Amal El-Mohtar, Victoria Janssen, Nicole Kornher-Stace (leader), A. J. Odasso, Navah Wolfe.
The film Pacific Rim created the idea of two people who are “drift-compatible,” able to live inside each other’s minds and memories without sustaining massive psychic damage. Let’s use this as a metaphor to explore our favorite speculative fiction duos—whether they’re friends, traveling companions, siblings, or spouses—and talk about what makes those deeply intimate pairings work.

Friday, July 11, 6:00 PM, F
From the French Revolution to Future History: Science Fiction and Historical Thinking.Christopher Cevasco, Phenderson Clark, Jonathan Crowe, John Crowley, Victoria Janssen (leader).
Arts journalist Jeet Heer wrote, “It’s no accident H.G. Wells wrote both [The] Time Machine and The Outline of History (one of the most popular history books ever), [and] it’s no accident that science fiction writers are also often historical novelists: Kim Stanley Robinson, Nicola Griffith, etc.” For Heer, science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and horror can all be grouped under the meta-genre of fantastika, and all emerged from the “epistemological rupture” of the French Revolution, which “forced us to think of history in new way, with new emphasis on ruptures and uncontrollable social forces.” Is Heer right to see these commonalities? Is it useful to think of historical fiction in fantastika terms? And how do speculative genres borrow from historical ones?

Friday, July 11, 7:00 PM, ENL
Recent Fiction Book Club: Persona. Victoria Janssen, Kate Nepveu (leader), Fran Wilde.
In a world where diplomacy has become celebrity, a young ambassador survives an assassination attempt and must join with an undercover paparazzo in a race to save her life, spin the story, and secure the future of her young country in this near-future political thriller. For author Genevieve Valentine, restraint is a mode of composition, both in the beautifully understated sparsity of her prose and in her protagonists’ taut, tense stillness. In Persona, where the degree to which one has or has not smiled reveals or conceals a wealth of information, restraint is crucial to a Face’s survival. Persona brings up questions of identity and celebrity, managing to be a tense, carefully wrought thriller while still nodding and winking at the camera. You’ll never look at a red carpet the same way again.

Saturday, July 12, 9:00AM, ENL
Classic Fiction Book Clu: HerlandKen Houghton, Victoria Janssen (leader), Sarah Langan.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a prominent social critic and lecturer at the turn of the 20th century, is perhaps best known for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a chilling study of a woman’s descent into insanity, and Women and Economics, a classic of feminist theory that analyzes the destructive effects of women’s economic reliance on men. In Herland, a vision of a feminist utopia, Gilman employs humor to engaging effect in a story about three male explorers who stumble upon an all-female society isolated somewhere in South America. Noting the advanced state of the civilization they’ve encountered, the visitors set out to find some males, assuming that since the country is so civilized, “there must be men.” A delightful fantasy, the story enables Gilman to articulate her then-unconventional views of male and female roles and capabilities, motherhood, individuality, privacy, the sense of community, sexuality, and many other topics.

Saturday, Jul 12, 1:00PM, ENL
In Memorium YA Book Club: Hat Full of SkyStacie Hanes, Victoria Janssen, Shira Lipkin, Rachel Steiger-Meister, Emily Wagner.
The second book in the Tiffany Aching series sees Pratchett’s young heroine ready to begin her magical apprenticeship, which goes nothing like she expects and leads to trouble, especially with other young witches-in-training. What she doesn’t know is that something insidious is coming after her, and none of the other witches can help. We wanted to do something to mark the death of genre giant Pratchett, and while any of his books would be worth talking about, the Tiffany Aching series is some of his most thoughtful work. The adventures of a young girl learning what it means to be a witch speak deeply to readers, as she demystifies some aspects of witchery and finds deeper mysteries of life and magic in others, all while learning to be clever, kind, and brave. Readers of all ages are welcome to join the conversation.

I’ll be at Readercon this weekend, July 10-13. All of my programming is on Friday, but I’ll also be around all day Saturday.

Friday July 11, 11:00 AM“Everything in Moderation: How to Moderate”Leah Bobet, Jim Freund, Elaine Isaak, Victoria Janssen (leader), James Patrick Kelly.
An exceptional moderator is usually someone who has moderated panels in the past, understands the subject matter, knows a bit about the panelists, and realizes that they are there to guide the conversation—not to impress the audience with their brilliant insight. Good moderators know that you are here for the panelists, and they work hard to coax the quiet panelists into the discussion and nicely shut down the the hijackers. Moderation is a skill and an art. We invite you to learn from our best.

Friday July 11, 2:00 PM“When the Magic Returns”John Chu, Max Gladstone, Daryl Gregory, Lev Grossman, Victoria Janssen (leader).
The “return” of magic into a mundane world is one of very few ways in which we see fantasy set in the future. Why is this? What makes fantasy and futurity so incompatible? Why is the return of magic so often associated with apocalypse, while its banishment is usually the consequence of scientific or industrial progress? From Aarne-Thompson tale types like the Fairies’ Farewell to Kim Harrison’s Hollows series, panelists will talk about the ways in which magic-as-technology can be explored.

Friday July 12, 3:00 PM“Speculative Fiction and World War I.”John Clute, Felix Gilman, Victoria Janssen (leader), Jess Nevins, Graham Sleight, Sonya Taaffe.
On 28 July 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and World War I began. Hugo Gernsback had not yet named science fiction at the time, but proto-SF stories inspired by the war exist, many early SF writers would draw inspiration from their experiences of the wartime era, and alternate history stories of WWI are numerous. WWI had a tremendous effect on fantasy and horror stories as well, with surrealist, expressionist, and apocalyptic modes flourishing alongside tales of lost arcadias. Looking back 100 years later, how did WWI shape the readers and writers of speculative fiction and the genre as a whole?

1. I had a couple of previews go live recently at Heroes and Heartbreakers: Summer Rain, an anthology, and Beyond the Velvet Rope by Tiffany Ashley, an erotic romance set at an exclusive nightclub.

2. I’m going to Readercon July 10-13, 2014, and will post my schedule as soon as it’s finalized.

3. I’ve spent the summer so far focusing on putting some stories up for Kindle – Nook will be next, once I get the hang of it. I’m experimenting with different covers and blurbs. The Wrangler’s Secret: The Magnificent Threesome, Part 1 is the story formerly known as “The Magnificent Threesome,” and is followed by The Gambler’s Naughty Playing Cards. I’ve written a third story in the series as well. Their length is in the 5000-6000 word range, and I’d classify them as lighthearted erotica.

A helpful friend wrote this blurb for me:

In the Wild West, a woman with a dangerous secret is about to meet her match… and her other match.

Austin disguised herself as a man to earn a living as a horse wrangler. But when she meets an interracial pair of roving gunslingers, she finds more than she bargained for. DeVille, who is white, is a silver-tongued gambler, and Harcourt, who is black, is an upright, uptight warrior. And she’s not the only one with a secret: the two fighting men are lovers!

After the three of them are swept into a desperate battle against a ruthless gang, their secrets come out… and their clothes come off! Austin finds more pleasure than she ever imagined in their hot and sweet interracial male/male/female threesome.

4. I’m also spending the summer trying to learn how to write blurbs. I’ve never gotten the hang of it, and I feel it’s an important skill, and worth developing.

5. I continue to write reviews for Publishers Weekly, but those are anonymous, so I can’t link them here. Sorry! But I’m learning a lot about writing reviews succinctly.

Belatedly, here’s my rambling report on the 2013 Readercon! I did three panels this year, leading one of them, and a kaffeeklatsch. All of my programming happened on Saturday, so unusually for me, I had Friday completely free. Most of the time when I am attending a con, I don’t have enough mental energy to attend panels I’m not on, but this time I went through the Friday schedule and made a list of everything that seemed interesting. Which of course meant that for some time slots there were two or even three items I wished I could attend simultaneously.

I arrived Thursday night with friends E! and Amy Goldschlager, after an epic journey that began in Philadelphia and wound through Manhattan and the wilds of Connecticut, including a ride across a river on a ferry, an adorable tot, and delicious, delicious ice cream in a freshly-made waffle cone. Thursday night was all socializing and attempting to find my roommates, one of whom I’d never met before. (My usual roommate was unable to attend.) I figured it would be best to introduce myself before we shared a bed. After some wackiness with shutting elevator doors, eventually the introduction was accomplished, and I don’t think either of us kicked or snored. I did fall out of the bed Sunday morning…but I digress.
I started off Friday with a quiet breakfast alone and one more perusal of the schedule, then found friends and chatted until Yoon Ha Lee’s reading at 11:00 am. That lasted half an hour, so I attempted to choose a panel for the last half of the hour…and ended up splitting it between two different ones, unable to make a choice. That set the standard for the rest of the day. I was too full of adrenaline, and too distracted by saying hello to friends, to really concentrate on any one panel. So I bounced among a number of different ones, had lunch with Twitter pal Ruth Sternglantz (and met a new person in the process, Val), and otherwise all-around schmoozed, all day. I got to meet Brian Attebery! We’ve been on a mailing list together for years, but had never met.

More name-dropping, which will be incomplete, so I apologize if I missed you: over the course of the con, I got to chat with Gwynne Garfinkle, Connie Hirsch, Rosemary Kirstein, Sarah Smith, Brett Cox, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Jim Kelly, Rose Fox, Tempest Bradford, Debra Doyle and Jim Macdonald, Ian Strock, Peter Dube, Julia Starkey, Sheila Williams, Greer Gilman, Faye Ringel, Kat Creighton, Glenn Grant, Lila Garrott, and of course Philly-area locals Tom Purdom, Michael Swanwick, Shveta Thakrar, Fran Wilde, E.C. Myers, Brad Hafford, Diane and Lee Weinstein, and roomies Vashti Bandy, Susannah Mandel, and Danielle Friedman. I also met Lisa Bradley through Gwynne and, briefly, Genevieve Valentine through Tempest – she provided me with much-appreciated spoilers for “Pacific Rim,” so I could see it with an easy mind! Most of these conversations took place in hallways…that happens a lot to me at Readercon. I was briefly introduced to Wesley Chu and Emily Wagner and Tilly whose last name I do not remember and…maybe a couple of other people?

Once the dealers’ room opened, I had my usual initial wander-through, during which I am not allowed to buy anything I hadn’t already planned to buy. On that and subsequent wanders, I stopped to chat with Steve Berman and Gavin Grant at their respective tables, and had two separate conversations about classic Dr. Who with JoSelle Vanderhooft and Rob Shearman. For a literary convention, I talked about Dr. Who quite a lot.

In the evening, I attended (in full!) a panel on fairy tales that included my dear friend Ann Tonsor Zeddies. Friday night was “Meet the Prose,” a shoutfest as usual because it is so very crowded. But I at least saw quite a few people, and handed out most of my stickers to people I didn’t know. The sentence on my stickers was from “8:00 P.M.: Appointment TeeVee.”
Saturday, I had planned on another quiet breakfast before my 9:00 am panel on the work of Patricia McKillip, but saw Kate Nepveu and her family and was invited to join them. I was glad I did, as I barely saw them for the rest of the con. My McKillip panel went well, then I had to rush to the romance panel, which I was leading.
I did not take notes on the writing romance in specfic panel, because there is no way I can both participate and make notes; I hope someone did! From my own notes, I can say that I listed Pamela Regis’ elements of a romance to start off, and had the panel talk about specfic that they felt had done romance well. We also discussed ways we think romance plots in specfic could be done better, and made a few recommendations. Even though I was keeping track of the time, I was astonished throughout by how fast it was going. If I ever lead a similar panel, I have a couple of spots I think I could tighten up my questions so we get through the basics more efficiently.

I had a short break before my last panel, “The Unexamined Privilege of Safety.” By this point, I was beginning to feel talked out, but the rest of the panelists were awesome and had great things to say. I then had a short break for lunch and book-buying before my kaffeeklatsch. I love having a kaffeeklatsch because that is a place where friends (and fans, if I happen to have any) will be able to easily find me; also, free coffee! I was scheduled with Cecilia Tan, so if no one showed up, we would at least be able to chat with each other. However, we each got a group of our own; I had lured a few extra friends with the promise of chairs, since there was such a lack of them in the renovating hotel’s non-lobby. Stephen R. Wilk attended, so we got to reconnect – we had shared a reading at Arisia several years ago, and eventually figured out which story he had read (he mostly writes nonfiction). The group also discussed the Muppets at great length.

I finished off Saturday eating Korean barbecue with friends from my former writing workshop, Ann Tonsor Zeddies, Steve Berman, and John Schoffstall; we also had friends JoSelle Vanderhooft and Alex Jablokov. Alas, we were too full to eat ice cream afterwards. I then attended a panel about reader shame, led by my friend Natalie Luhrs and also including Ann. After that panel, to my good fortune, I met Tat Wood! He’s one of the authors of a nonfiction series about Dr. Who, About Time, which I love beyond the telling.

I made the Long Walk back to the elevators with many stops for hugs and goodbyes, always the most painful part of any convention. Back in my room, I packed and attempted to get some sleep before my early morning breakfast with Graham Sleight (we didn’t talk about Dr. Who quite as much as normal) and departure.

I’m attending a couple of my favorite science fiction/fantasy conventions next year, WisCon and Readercon. One of the reasons I love them is that they solicit ideas for the programming that will be offered. Here are some of the panel ideas I’ve come up with so far.
They’re rough ideas; it’s seemed to work well in the past if I didn’t narrow the topic down too much, because eventually other people will be tweaking the ideas and voting on them and figuring out what will work best with the available panelists. If you have any thoughts, feel free to comment!

I love trying to come up with catchy titles, too.

Apocalypses, Personality Sorting, and Love Triangles: How is current YA speculative fiction reflecting current social anxieties? And what’s the next trend? Social justice movements?

Addiction in Fiction: Real drugs, imaginary drugs, and magical addictions to other people’s dreams – how are addictions handled in science fiction and fantasy? How about fictional worlds in which addiction is not seen as a problem? Or in which addiction has become adaptive (are vampires addicted to blood?). The panel could focus on either real or imaginary addictive substances.Unpacking Tarzan: Interest in the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs is bound to increase this spring when the new John Carter of Mars movie premieres. ERB character Tarzan, though, is the one who really took root in American culture, with movies and comic strips popularizing the character until he was firmly entrenched in “canon.” How does the Tarzan character’s popularity relate to enduring sterotypes of Africa? How does Tarzan, and the idea of the “white man gone native” (or in this case, ape) still reverberate in today’s entertainment world? Who are the modern descendents of Tarzan? (*cough* “Avatar”)

Fen to Pros and Pros to Fen: In many sectors of fandom, those who make money from writing or editing or publishing speculative fiction are sometimes set apart from those who are primarily readers. This separation isn’t present everywhere, though. Some “pros” maintain fannish activity and some who primarily act as “fans” might have, for example, sold a novel or two. With the growing mainstream popularity of fanfiction and self-publishing, how is that division changing? How do these divisions affect online interactions, live interactions, and how fandom is viewed from outside? Is there truly a “geek hierarchy”?

MUPPETS!: What did you think of the 2011 movie? What’s been your life experience of the muppets? Does your age group make a difference in how you feel about them? I think it would be awesome to discuss the muppets as a vehicle for social change, but suspect we wouldn’t get beyond the squeeing.

YA Love Triangles – Cultural Advance or Retreat?: A common theme in popular YA novels, spec fic and otherwise, is the ongoing love triangle, usually one girl who is in love with two boys. So far, she always chooses just one of them. Why is this so popular right now? Does it support at least thoughts of polyamory or other alternatives, or does the average reader refuse to consider that option? Is the love triangle meant to demonstrate conclusively that only heteronormative couples are acceptable? Have any YA writers been specifically working against this trend?

“The scene was small-scale in its charm, nothing but a corner of the Burlington Marriott with ballrooms, most of them host to panels discussing things that sounded more like grad school seminars than SF fan freakouts. They had names like “Animal or Alien: How Body Structure Shapes Mind”; “The Pseudo-Religiosity of Teleological SF”; and “Feeling Very Post-Slipstream.””

Joshua of Glyphpress wishes all cons were like Readercon.Kate Nepveu’s report, includes her recollections of “The Dissonant Power of Alternative Voicing” and “Borders (if Any) Between Fan Fiction and Original Fiction.” For “Paranormal Romance and Otherness” she noted “if your similar-to-our-world setting is diverse in lots of ways even before you put your mythical creatures in, then you’re not displacing existing issues (of race, gender, class, ability, sexuality) onto the mythical creatures, thereby erasing the existing people (or equating them with creatures!) and replacing difficult issues with something easier to deal with in a shallow and glib way. If you think about your tropes and your worldbuilding instead of using defaults, you’re less likely to end up with unconsidered skeevy power dynamics. If you make your characters well-rounded and think about all aspects of their lives, you’ll have addressed whatever intersectional issues affect them.” Which sums up a lot of what the panel was meant to be about.